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textedit question - formating up/down for Japanese

dbooster

dbooster

macrumors member
Original poster
In textedit, is there a way to format the text to go up/down, right-to-left, such as Japanese is usually formatted? I see I can change the direction from left/right to right/left, but I can't find any option to change the space direction to up and down.

Does that make sense? In other words, I want to format it like this (using english in the example, with spacing to make it easier to show what I want):

Code: 
t    r     d    u     m
o    i     o    p     o
     g     w          v
l    h     n    a     i
e    t          n     n
f               d     g
t

is there an easy option to make it move like this by default as I'm typing?

Thanks!!
 
Unless someone knows a trick, I don't think it's possible. Beyond not being able to find the setting in TextEdit, I noticed the following, because I was wondering if RTF supported this:

If I create a vertically formatted Japanese-language document in Word 04, and then save it as both rich text and a Word document, Word is able to re-open both of these and preserve vertical formatting, but in TextEdit, both show up horizontally formatted.

Have you perhaps tried AppleWorks? Or if you have MS Office, obviously, that's a natch fit.
 
Hmm... I do have MS Word, but I can't figure out how to do it in there either. Where is the option?
 
First, open the folder containing Word in your apps directory. In the additional tools folder, there is a "language registry." Drag the icon for MS Word onto the icon for the registry. And then you will get the option to switch Word into Japanese mode. You can still write in European languages, but you will get the relevant Japanese features.
 
Yeah, this isn't possible--it's not built into the standard Apple text engine, sadly. I also recently realized that it's not supported in HTML, either, which isn't a biggie but will probably contribute to the steady decline of vertically written Japanese in the long run.

At least Word can do it, although switching languages is a bloody pain and I hate to use it unless I'm desperate.
 
Thanks, mkrishnan. Not a perfect solution, but better than nothing. I'm going to submit this to Apple as something they need to add to future versions of their programs. Their support of Japanese is excellent, so I'm surprised they overlooked this one.

makosuke - I can understand html not supporting this, but I imagine you can use css to format a document this way. I'm not a web-programmer, so correct me if I'm wrong. If there's no good way to do this, then it's something we should definitely submit to the W3C for addition to future versions of html or css.
 
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